Our preliminary experiments and analysis show that summarizing legal contracts in plain English is challenging, and point to the potential usefulness of a simplification or style transfer system in the summarization pipeline. Yet this is challenging. First, there may be a substantial domain gap between legal documents and texts that existing simplification systems are trained on (e.g., Wikipedia, news). Second, popular supervised approaches such as treating sentence simplification as monolingual machine translation [1]}, [2]}, [3]}, [4]}, [5]} would be difficult to apply due to the lack of sentence-aligned parallel corpora. Possible directions include unsupervised lexical simplification utilizing distributed representations of words [6]}, [7]}, unsupervised sentence simplification using rich semantic structure  [8]}, or unsupervised style transfer techniques [9]}, [10]}, [11]}. However, there is not currently a dataset in this domain large enough for unsupervised methods, nor corpora unaligned but comparable in semantics across legal and plain English, which we see as a call for future research.
